Forrest wrote:How big (in volume) a pile of gold would a reasonable lifetime's worth of money (today) have to be?

$50,000/year * 100 years = $5 million = 118 kg = 6+ liters. Imagine 3 2-liter Coke bottles, with their tops cut off and the volume filled with gold coins. Add part of a 4th bottle, since I rounded down plus coins aren't as dense as a solid lump of gold. Or imagine two milk gallons, filled with gold coins.

BTW, one milk gallon jug filled with gold would mass about 72 kg, or 160 pounds. Silver would be a bit over half that, 87 pounds.

Forrest wrote:Wow, that is surprisingly small. So a chest (like the old fashioned pirate's chests) of gold at the foot of your bed would set you up for life.

Sure, if your lifestyle was relatively modest and you had anywhere to reliably sell the gold for its true value. Pawn shops and dealers are going to take a cut, remember. If you go all Scrooge McDuck... well, THEN you are starting to resemble someone genuinely wealthy with that much gold. But still less so than the 1%, probably?

The entire premise of the SERRATED EDGE books, which I just reread, is that the elves want to help people (specifically children in need), but these days if they just give them chests of magically crafted gold it sends up waaaaay too many red flags and it's the kids or their parents who are harmed by that. So instead, they needed a money laundering scheme. The good elves decided that racing cars was fun, so they set up a racing company to manufacture cars with non-steel components (magically produced, though they pretended otherwise) and got really into the engineering side of things.

The fact is, electronic currency is waaaaay easier, but much more vulnerable. It's hard to carry off a lot of gold, but relatively easy to commit identity theft.

The national debt of the United Kingdom in 1870 was just under £800,000,000; a troy ounce of gold was worth £39.25 (well, 39 pounds 5 shlllings, you get the deal), so it would have been (convert, convert) 634 metric tons of gold, or a solid cube 10' 6" on a side). The packing density of coins is roughly 0.66, so in "big gold coins" it would be a pile of coins the size of a FedEx delivery truck.